Wearables, Cancer Care & Algorithms: Rock Health Demo Day in Photos

Rock Health Class of Fall 2013

Halle Tecco, Rock Health Founder

Tecco announced that Rock Health is seeking up to 100 limited partners for a new investment fund focused on the 10 graduating Rock Health startups.

Photo by Wade Roush

ThriveOn

ThriveOn is developing a Web- and mobile-based programs designed to make methal health treatment more accessible to patients. Algorithms assess patients’ answers to questionnaires and match them with reading material, videos, surveys, and journaling tools, backed by a remote coach who “delivers feedback and ensures high compliance,” says co-founder Alejandro Foung.

Photo by Wade Roush

ThriveOn

ThriveOn spent two years studying the effectiveness of a pilot program at Stanford and Washington University in St. Louis designed to treat eating disorders. The program reduced disordered eating by 50 percent, at one-tenth the cost of traditional therapy, Foung said. The company is about to roll out the program to every state university in Missouri.

Photo by Wade Roush

CancerIQ

CancerIQ aims to bridge the gap between big-city academic medical centers, where the five-year survival rates for the top 10 cancers are 90 percent, and regional and small-town hospitals, where it’s only 70 percent. The startup has built an online data sharing paltform where providers at smaller hospitals can study cancer treatment trends based on data from tens thousands of patients.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

CancerIQ

CancerIQ’s program is designed not just to improve survival rates but to help community oncology practices retain more of patients and lower their cost of care. Says CEO Feyi Olopade, “Where you live will no longer determine whether you live.”

Photo by Wade Roush

Spire

Spire is developing a wearable sensor that monitors a users’ breathing rate---a measure of stress levels---and connects to software that issues real-time notifications when users are agitated, urging them to calm down by taking a deep breath. Beta testers at LinkedIn reported that the device improved their focus and productivity.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

Spire

In contrast to most wearable activity trackers, Spire’s appeal is that it can help users be healthier and less stressed during the 84 percent of the day when they’re not moving, says co-founder Jonathan Palley, The startup plans to raise crowdfunding dollars to manufacture its prototype respiration monitor in 2014.

Photo by Wade Roush

Augmedix

Doctors spend too much of their time interacting with electronic health record systems and not enough interacting with patients, according to Augmedix CEO Ian Shakil. The company is developing software that will show key data to primary care doctors a heads-up display on a Google Glass device.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

Augmedix

Augmedix hasn’t revealed how its Glass interface will work or what data will be displayed, but it says its surveys show that patients aren’t put off by the idea that their doctor might be wearing Glass, as long as their data is safeguarded. “We are on a mission to rehumanize the doctor-patient interaction,” Shakil says.

Photo by Wade Roush

Smart Patients

Smart Patients, co-founded by former Google’s former chief health strategist Roni Zeiger, is an online community where cancer patients can learn from each other about treatment options. It includes a specialized search engine helps patients find information about clinical trials.

Photo by Wade Roush

SmartPatients

Cancer patients come to Smart Patients to share information about their experiences with various treatments, the best sources for second opinions, and the like. “What we are really talking about is injecting the power of community---networked, motivated patients---into several aspects of healthcare that don’t work today,” Zeiger says.

Photo by Wade Roush

Anapsis

Anapsis is an online platform where data scientists in healthcare and other fields can share data analyses, including not just their raw data or results but also their basic models and algorithms. These models usually come in the form of executable files that are difficult to share via e-mail or enterprise file sharing systems, says co-founder Rustam Lalkaka.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

Anapsis

Users can run their algorithms on the startup’s cloud servers. “You hit run, supply your dataset and parameters, and get your results right in the browser or through Excel,” says Lalkaka. “We are trying to turbocharge data-driven healthcare.”

Photo by Wade Roush

CrixLabs

CrixLabs has developed a software simulator called NuSilico that predicts the effectiveness of candidate drug molecules against cancer. A trial that might take more than three years in the field can be simulated in one month on NuSilico, according to co-founder Shalini Ananda.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

CrixLabs

CrixLabs' NuSilico software runs on cloud servers, and the company's studies have shown that there is an “unprecedented” correlation between the platform’s predictions and lab results, Ananda says. She hopes the system will lower the cost of research and development for pharmaceutical companies.

Photo by Wade Roush

LiftLabs

Lift Labs is building an assistive device for Parkinson’s Disease sufferers that senses and compensates for essential tremor. The stabilizer will works with multiple attachments; the company has started with a spoon attachment that helps Parkinson’s patients eat foods like soup or cereal.

Photo by Wade Roush

LiftLabs

The Lift Labs “Liftware” device cancels out 70 percent of the movement from essential tremor, according to CEO Anupam Pathak. The company is partnering with the International Essential Tremor Foundation to make the $295 device available at no cost to patients who can’t afford to pay for one out of pocket.

Photo by Wade Roush

Sensentia

Sensentia is using what co-founder Jan Jungclaus calls “a breakthrough approach in computational comprehension” to automate customer service in healthcare administration. The company’s software can analyze information such as insurance claims data and answer questions submitted via Web or mobile channels more accurately than human call-center operatives.

Photo courtesy of Rock Health

Sensentia

Jungclaus thinks Sensentia’s technology could save healthcare providers billions of dollars per year in administraive costs by “automating complex tasks and processes that previosly could only be done by people.”

Photo by Wade Roush

Amplify Health

Amplify Health works with physician groups, health systems, and self-insured employers to reduce avoidable healthcare costs by combing through electronic medical records and claims data to highlight “the difference between what should have happened and what actually happened,” says CEO Eric Page.

Photo by Wade Roush

Amplify Health

Page says Amplify’s software can identify whether patients are following through on recommended treatments, as well as examples of patients who go “off the reservation” and tap more costly healthcare options. By reining in these behaviors, employers who work with Amplify are seeing an average 30 percent reduction in spending for hospital care, Page says.

Photo by Wade Roush

Rock Health On the Move

An architect's rendering of Rock Health's new office space at 455 Mission Bay Boulevard, to be occupied this December.

Rock Health, the San Francisco-based startup accelerator focused on companies at the intersection of healthcare and digital technology, presented its latest class of startups to the world yesterday in a demo day session at UCSF’s Genentech Hall.

The 10 companies in this batch—Rock Health’s fifth since its founding in 2011—are working on technologies as diverse as hardware (Lift Labs is building an assistive device to compensate for tremor in Parkinson’s Disease patients), wearables (Augmedix is making a Google Glass interface for doctors, while Spire is developing a wearable respiration monitor for stress reduction), cancer care (CancerIQ helps hospitals share data on treatment trends, while Smart Patients has created an online community for cancer patients) and data handling and analysis (Anapsis helps data scientists share algorithms while Amplify Health roots through patient data to find areas where physician networks and employers could save money).

Some of the entrepreneurs behind the latest Rock Health companies switched into digital health from more traditional areas of software, Web, or mobile technology; others have spent their whole careers in healthcare or the life sciences. Most of the companies are in active fundraising mode, though they’ve already raised a collective $5.5 million in seed funding, according to Rock Health.

Rock Health founder Halle Tecco shared two pieces of news from Rock Health itself. For the first time, the accelerator has created a special investment fund that will put an equal amount of money into each of the 10 graduating companies. Rock Health says it’s seeking up to 100 accredited investors to become limited partners in the fund, which it formed in partnership with AngelList.

Also, Tecco said Rock Health is set to leave its Chinatown office and move into fancy new quarters in the Mission Bay district—on the ground floor of a research building currently occupied by life sciences companies like Nektar and Bayer—in December.

Here’s an alphabetical list of the companies that presented yesterday, with links to their websites, where available. See the captions in the slideshow above for more details. Thanks to Rock Health for providing several of the photos.